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A bright star in the JavaScript community, Addy Osmani has skyrocketed to prominence not only for his fabulous JavaScript articles and open source contributions but for also being one of the friendliest and approachable developers around. His blog is a treasture trove of front-end knowledge and well-worth the visit. In this post, we'll chat with Addy about how he got his feet wet in JS and bring up some tough topics relating to his work in developer relations at Google.

The Carl Sagan of front-end web development? Read on to find out why readers think so.

Spear phising is an extremely potent hacking vector that combines social engineering with phishing. Basically, an attacker tries to learn enough about a specific victim to inform the design of a fake email that the victim is more likely to think is legitimate and thus open and engage with.... Over the last several months, I have been the target of what might be a new, more scalable, approach to spear phishing. I have been receiving phishing emails that are sent using the names of people I know but not their email addresses...

I've seen this sort of thing years ago when an acquaintance had his/her pc/email account compromised and the spammer send spam to everyone in the address-book claiming to be from another randomly selected name in it. Unless I'm overlooking something there isn't anything new here.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

I was explaining on Hacker News why Windows fell behind Linux in terms of operating system kernel performance and innovation. And out of nowhere an anonymous Microsoft developer who contributes to the Windows NT kernel wrote a fantastic and honest response acknowledging this problem and explaining its cause. His post has been deleted! Why the censorship? I am reposting it here. This is too insightful to be lost.

New features help much more at review time than improvements to old ones.

On August 31, 2012, Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki posted four papers on the Internet. The titles were inscrutable. The volume was daunting: 512 pages in total. The claim was audacious: he said he had proved the ABC Conjecture, a famed, beguilingly simple number theory problem that had stumped mathematicians for decades. Then Mochizuki walked away. He did not send his work to the Annals of Mathematics. Nor did he leave a message on any of the online forums frequented by mathematicians around the world. He just posted the papers, and waited.

The funny thing is that within a few months of our launch, several competitors emerged and they all had crawlers. But, from our users’s perspective, we were more advanced since we had categorization which was definitely no easily automated task. We didn’t actually build a real crawler for the first 9 months and just kept scaling manually by hiring more data entry professionals. Instead, we were able to focus our resources on improving the product and user acquisition. It’s now clear to me that not building that crawling technology early on was one of the reasons our startup succeeded.

Sometimes failing to automate gives you a clearer view of how automation should work later.

Yes, Update 3 is likely the last of the updates to the VS 2012 line. Of course, we'll still continue to fix any critical issues people find but we are winding it down and focusing on VS V.Next. I'd like to think many of the issues you refer to will get addressed there and, if not, I hope we'll get to them in the V.Next update train. Referring to the above - Update 3 is the update where we slow down the churn, address remaining high impact customer issues and any regressions introduced in Update 2.

Following the cupholder principle, GPUs began to evolve to allow easier to access APIs from more common programming languages becoming General Purpose GPU or GPGPUs. Several systems researchers at Georgia Tech and elsewhere are now redesigning chip layouts to make the best most efficient uses of CPUs and GPGPUs. The theory community hasn't seem to catch on yet. There should be some nice theoretical model that captures the vector and other operations of a GPGPU and then we should search for algorithms that make the best use of the hardware.

As a fair warning to the reader, these primers are a bit more terse than what you’d find in your average textbook. I only introduce the bare minimum required to understand the main content posts, so there are carefully chosen gaps whose exclusion is necessary for time’s sake. If the reader is confused about something, or wants a deeper explanation of a concept we deliberately leave out, feel free to leave a comment asking about it and we will do our best to fill in the gaps.

In this episode Nick Harris and Nathan Totten are joined by Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Windows Azure, who introduces us to the new Windows Azure SDK 2.0. Scott shows off a few of the many new features in SDK 2.0 including the new Table Explorer and Query Builder. He demonstrates several of the new diagnostics features for Cloud Services and Web Sites, and he deploys a Cloud Service using the new parallel upgrade.

Unveiled in 2005, Arduino boards don't have the CPU horsepower of a Raspberry Pi. They don't run a full PC operating system either. Arduino isn't obsolete, though—in fact, its plethora of connectivity options makes it the better choice for many electronics projects.... Last December, we featured 10 of the most amazing Raspberry Pi projects, including arcade cabinets, robotics, and a wearable computer. This one goes to 11—as in, we'll show you 11 awesome things hackers and electronics enthusiasts have created with the Arduino.

Discover the Ouya: "a new kind of game console." This Android-powered system is the first of its kind. It's specifically designed to be open to professional and amateur game designers alike, with free software development tools included with every console. Full disclosure: The folks at Ouya tout this to be "the first totally open video game console." They have so much confidence in the Ouya, in fact, that they sent us a retail unit to take apart. Game on, folks.

Final score: this gadget has enough repairability to earn extra lives.

After discovering that at least one account had been compromised, we sent a company-wide email to change email passwords immediately. The attacker used their access to a different, undiscovered compromised account to send a duplicate email which included a link to the phishing page disguised as a password-reset link. This dupe email was not sent to any member of the tech or IT teams, so it went undetected. This third and final phishing attack compromised at least 2 more accounts. One of these accounts was used to continue owning our Twitter account.

This is not a joke. Repeat: this is not a joke. If this were a joke you would be advised to...

Microsoft, which already has a stake in Barnes & Noble’s Nook and college bookstore businesses, is offering to buy them outright for $1 billion, according to a report in TechCrunch, based on leaked internal documents. The documents also reportedly say that Barnes & Noble plans to discontinue its line of Nook tablets by the end of fiscal year 2014, while letting the e-readers stick around for awhile longer.

A nook can’t read so a nook can’t cook, SO... a Surface with Nook might be a good hook.

On May 9, we invite you to participate in Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). The purpose of the day is to get people talking, thinking and learning about digital (web, software, mobile, etc.) accessibility and users with different disabilities. The target audience of GAAD is the design, development, usability, and related communities who build, shape, fund and influence technology and its use. While people may be interested in the topic of making technology accessible and usable by persons with disabilities, the reality is that they often do not know how or where to start.

Take an hour out of your day to experience digital accessibility first-hand.

Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews in which we talk to developers about their backgrounds, projects, interests and pet peeves. In this installment we talk to Dave Auld, a CodeProject star that continues to shine brighter.

Learn more about our own Dave Auld, whose day job is a bit more adventurous than coding.

A couple of days ago I wrote about Why I am the world’s greatest lover (and other worthless security claims) and it really seemed to resonate with people. In short, whacking a seal on your website that talks about security awesomeness in no way causes security awesomeness.... So let’s check out exactly what’s going on here and you really need video to understand the fatal flaw in the logic of SSL logos coming down over HTTPS.